Tuesday, August 4, 2009

chilled avocado soup + honeydew and cream ice pops with pistachios

sometimes i go through spurts where i enthusiastically try several new recipes a week for weeks on end. this has not been the case for the past month or so- i’ve been on a “let’s eat cereal for dinner” or “let’s go out” kick lately.

however, last week i spotted a couple interesting recipes in my marthastewart living magazine- chilled avocado soup + honeydew and cream ice pops with pistachios. this weekend, the husband and i decided to test both out.

we started with the chilled avocado soup. the ingredients were simple enough- half an avocado, 1 cucumber (peeled, seeded, diced), ½ cup buttermilk, 1 small garlic clove 1 tb lemon juice, salt, pepper, plus water for thinning if necessary. all we had to do was whirl all of it in a blender and then chill for an hour or so.

unfortunately, the avocado was a little raw. i had put it in the fridge earlier in the week and completely forgot about it. however, my brilliant coworker, who apparently knows everything there is to know about avocados, gave me a tip to put my avocado in a paper bag (and since i don’t have any paper bags at home, to wrap it in newspaper), and stick it in the oven (with the oven off). apparently this method works best if you leave it in there for at least 8 hours, but I only had about 2… and i really do think it was slightly softer when i pulled it out. i wrapped the avocado in a page of the sunday comics :).

taste test:

pretty good- a little tart. we had doubled the recipe so we had plenty of soup leftover for saturday. fairly filling and the flavors were more involved on the second day. i bet it would have been even better if the avocado was actually ripe.